AmphiBot II: An Amphibious Snake Robot that Crawls and Swims using a Central Pattern Generator

This article presents AmphiBot II, an am- phibious snake robot designed for both serpentine loco- motion (crawling) and swimming. It is controlled by an on-board central pattern generator (CPG) inspired by those found in vertebrates. The CPG is modelled as a chain of coupled nonlinear oscillators, and is designed to produce travelling waves. Its parameters can be modi- fled on the ∞y. We present the hardware of the robot and the structure of the CPG, then the systematic parameter tests done in simulation and with the real robot to char- acterize how the speed of locomotion depends on the parameters determining the frequency, amplitude and wavelength of the body undulation.